Barnaby's other 'failures' deserve more attention

Bill HoffmanWhether taking on developers hell-bent on destroying the Coast’s natural appeal or a Prime Minister indifferent to the plight of the poor, Bill Hoffman has never been one to mince his words. Bill’s been a journalist for 32 years, 29 of those on the Coast. Love him or hate him, he'll get you blogging.

GIVEN his status as Deputy Prime Minister and Australia's obsession with reality television shows, the amount of attention being shown to the break-up of Barnaby Joyce's marriage and his relationship with a young former staffer is perhaps understandable.

And it serves the constant need for distraction from matters of substance that truly affect our quality of life, threaten future prosperity and bring the risk of greater loss of life.

The only thing of public interest in the Joyce saga is contained in the statement that he rates the breakdown of his marriage and a family containing four apparently charming daughters as one of the biggest failures of his life.

It begs an obvious but as-yet unasked question being: exactly, what are the others? An answer to that question may be found in the National Party leader's continuing embrace of coal, the quest for which in the case of Adani threatens the aquifer across three states on which his constituency relies for the continued survival of one of Australia's most critical food bowls.

Or is it his failure of leadership in not embracing and clearly enunciating the challenges of climate change and shaping the National Party as an organisation willing to educate and drive policy that would represent the genuine reforms so desperately needed?

Because on those two fronts Barnaby Joyce has been shamefully lacking, cosying up to the billionaire profiteers who multiply their fortunes in the comfortable knowledge that whatever catastrophes are to come, they and theirs will be insulated by the weight of their bank balances.

By any measure, the Deputy Prime Minister has failures more deserving of a disdain than those that are deeply personal and truly understood only by those intimately involved.

It's the man's opportunism at the expense of genuine policy, the moral weakness of his leadership, the shallowness of his retail politics and the gleeful immaturity of the way he guffaws his way through sessions of the nation's parliament that provide fertile and justifiable grounds for condemnation.

Yet there was one commentator this past week who suggested Joyce's political survival depended on his capacity to sell his new domestic arrangements as a Love Actually story of romance.

Have we really reached the point where political fortunes rely to that extent on the superficial over substance?

In Broken Hill this past week, the mayor Katherine McBride, a pastoralist with responsibility for 20,000 sheep on a vast 275,000ha property, backed by a 13,000-signature petition, was denied a meeting with the NSW Premier in a bid to stop a $467 million, 270km pipeline between Wentworth and the iconic inland city that is being starved of water.

The mayor and her constituents' reasoning is understandable. Before their water bills are loaded with the expense of a pipeline solution, they want completion of inquiries into the alleged theft and corrupt use of water from the Darling and Barwon rivers.

They fear, aside from greatly adding to their cost of living, a water pipeline would allow the decommissioning of four lakes that now supply Broken Hill with its water, enable the ignoring of illegal practices that have left them dry, killing off downstream flows in the process for the benefit of a few at the expense of many.

And it's not Barnaby's Nationals in their corner but the Greens.

Water will become more precious as the extremes of drought as well as flood bite harder, yet the leader of the party whose constituency's survival depends so heavily on the environment remains silent.

The Climate Council's dire warnings this week of the looming impacts of climate change and coastal erosion devastating our tourism industry and inundating coastal cities and towns will fail to excite a policy response.

Instead, more people and critical public infrastructure investment will be blithely allowed in vulnerable places.

Ecologist Professor Lesley Hughes told me it now appeared increasingly likely that rather than listening to the clearly defined science, it will take a catastrophic event to shift policy - meaning the cost and impacts of the future will be far greater than necessary.

It's an inertia that has allowed the continued construction of gutter-to- gutter, poorly oriented and designed McMansions and so-called affordable housing solutions alike, sitting treeless under a baking sun over summer, sucking power from the grid to drive air- conditioning systems, the need for which could have been greatly reduced with thought and better design.

Barnaby and the soap opera of his personal life - seriously, we all have more to worry about.